How to Have Better Conversations About Privilege
3 actionable ideas to move past shame, blame, and denial
“Privilege” has become a loaded word. Whenever I hear it, the conversation is usually going in one of these three directions:
- Someone is accusing or calling someone else out on their privilege, often employing blame
- A person is shamefully admitting their own privilege, almost apologizing for it
- Someone is denying their privilege, trying to defend themselves that they “didn’t have it that easy.”
Those conversations usually don’t bring about the intended effect. They keep us in the defensive mode and rarely lead to any constructive outcomes.
Is it possible to talk about privilege without blame, shame, or denial? I think we should try.
The Biggest Misunderstanding About Privilege
The biggest misunderstanding about privilege is that either you have it, or you don’t.
As a white, cis, able-bodied woman in her 30s, born and raised in post-communist Poland but living in the UK, I recognize this every day. My identity makes me privileged in some contexts but not others.
Of course, I have more social advantage than the majority of people on this planet. But I also have just enough of a disadvantage to experience that privilege isn’t simply a spectrum.
It’s a multidimensional space which contains many identity aspects. It can be illustrated in a form of a wheel with different sections.
In each section, the closer to the middle you find yourself, the more privilege you hold in the given area.
Assessing yourself on the various aspects of the Wheel of Privilege can give you a better idea of your various social advantages. This provides a more nuanced understanding of privilege — not as a one-zero value, but as a landscape we’re all navigating.
Journalist Steven Poole wrote in The Guardian that “checking your privilege” roughly translates to:
“You should consider how aspects of your identity that are favored by society are causing you to interpret this topic wrongly.”
This is the crux of the matter. In the discussions of privilege, we should try and go beyond just deciding who has more of it and who has less of it. What’s more useful is trying to understand which aspects of it are clouding your ability to see things clearly.
That’s where “checking your privilege” starts having more practical meaning.
What Separates Privilege-Aware Folks From the Crowd
In the same article, Poole continues:
“In this understanding of “privilege”, there is hardly anyone who lacks it completely. We are all privileged compared with the most wretched person on Earth. And being able to argue about privilege is itself a privilege.”
I’m going to assume that, since you have the time and device allowing you to read this article, you have some privilege in your life. Maybe it’s not a lot, and not in all the aspects illustrated on the Wheel of Privilege.
But the degree to which you have it isn’t the core of this discussion. This question is:
Why are some people better at seeing their privilege than others — and how can we help those “others” see it?
In my experience, people who lack privilege in at least one major aspect of their lives have better awareness of where they do have it. For me, being a woman and immigrant (the less privileged) helps me maintain awareness of my white, cis-gender, and economic advantage.
Similarly, the men I have met who were most aware of their male privilege were those who were coming from otherwise disadvantaged social groups. They might have come from a working class background, a migrant or refugee family, or they haven’t had a lot of formal education.
When you know what it means to be underprivileged in one area, you develop empathy. A man who has been a refugee can extrapolate his experience to sense how a woman or a trans-gender person might feel in a patriarchal culture. He doesn’t question whether “male privilege is a thing.” He knows he might not be aware of its full implications — precisely because he’s a male.
On the other hand, research shows that people who deny their own privilege are often… those most privileged. Why is that?
In a Stanford Business publication, Patrick J. Kiger writes that it’s often because recognizing their privileges would equal admitting that they didn’t earn all their success. As Kiger put it, “Americans who’ve benefited from their complexion or networks are under psychological pressure to prove their personal merit.”
Because of that pressure, most privileged folks often go into denial about their good fortune. Two Stanford academics, Laura T. Phillips and Brian S. Lowery, discovered this in a series of experiments. When confronted with their social advantage, the “beneficiaries of class privilege respond (…) by increasing their claims of personal hardships and hard work, to cover privilege in a veneer of meritocracy.”
In the narrative of the American Dream, everyone wants to believe that achievement is a result of virtue. Accepting that your success has to do with your skin tone or network can feel like a psychological threat to self-worth. That’s why conversations about privilege often fall on deaf ears of those who hold a lot of it.
So how do we talk about privilege in a way that elicits a more open, positive response — especially from those who’ve been most favored by society?
3 Conversation Moves To Talk About Privilege More Effectively
To create an equitable world, we first need to learn how to talk about inequity.
“If we can agree on the facts that the system is providing unfair privilege, that provides us with a path to address that inequity,” Laura T. Phillips says, “We see that willingness to acknowledge the privilege as a necessary first step toward accomplishing change.”
How can we move forward once we know that privilege has many dimensions and that those who hold it often have difficulty seeing it? How can we have better conversations to support the willingness to acknowledge privilege?
Here are three conversation moves that can help.
1. Assume you’re missing part of the picture
“If a person’s behavior doesn’t make sense to you, it is because you are missing a part of their context.— Devon Price, Ph.D.
When Devon Price wrote these words, he pointed at how often we interpret the consequences of people’s personal and social constraints as signs of laziness. I think it can also be applied to talking about privilege.
When interacting with a person who’s not aware of their privilege, try and withhold judgment. It’s easy to assume someone’s ignorance on that basis. But what if there is a part of their context that you’re indeed missing?
Just because someone presents as male, white, cis-gender, or another privileged identity, doesn’t mean they don’t have an underprivileged part of their identity — for example, invisible disability. And even if that’s not the case, holding that possibility in mind will help you find compassion for them.
Compassion always helps.
2. Replace the word “privilege”
“The way we use the word privilege removes contextual nuance, implying that privilege is something you’re either born with, or without, based on being in, or out of, a group.” — Joy VerPlanck, D.E.T. , Michaela Simpson, Ph.D, Janet M. Stovall
The group of writers and thinkers from Neuroleadership Institute quoted above are on to something important. The way we’ve been using the word “privilege” has so many negative connotations that it’s worth considering dropping the word altogether.
They suggest that “privilege” elicits a threat response from a lot of people, which leads them to defend themselves. That’s why they suggest swapping it for “advantage.” This word has much more positive connotations and hence increases the chance of the person with the advantage to maintain a positive self-image.
Additionally, calling it “advantage” makes it easier to capture its contextuality. People may have an advantage in some situations but not others. With the use of the word “privilege,” this isn’t always so clear.
3. Help people feel good about themselves first
“When given the chance to first bolster their sense of personal merit, those benefiting from privilege no longer claim hardships in response to evidence of privilege.” — Laura T. Phillips and Brian S. Lowery
When seeing someone with a lot of privilege and denying it, the instinct can be to rush to prove them wrong. But as researchers have observed (and you probably have, too), calling them out usually leads to self-defense.
That’s because people want to feel good about themselves. Admitting their privilege before they’re recognized for their efforts feel threatening.
Phillips and Lowery found that when people are first given a chance to feel good about their personal accomplishments, they tend to be more open to admitting their advantages. So next time you’re having a conversation about it, give them a chance to feel seen first.
This isn’t about protecting their fragility. It’s about getting them to hear your point.
Let’s Change How We Talk About Privilege
The social justice conversation is among the most important ones we can be having right now. We shouldn't shy away from it.
At the same time, it contains many dead-ends, rapid turns, and bumps.
Privilege is one of the trickiest topics to navigate. Without the right perspective, language, and compassion, my sense is that we’re not getting any further.
Some may argue that it’s the most privileged groups that should be adapting their language — and not the other way round. If you’re calling someone out or expressing your own struggle coming from the lack of privilege — they should be the ones making space for you.
And I agree with you. It would be ideal if it was like that. But what to do if it is not? We can either complain about it — or, drive the sense of agency back to ourselves.
In the words of the thinkers from the Neuroleadership Institute:
“If you think words shouldn’t matter with a message as important as equality, you’re right. If you think it doesn’t matter, go to a courtroom and replace “yes, Your Honor” with “sure thing, Toots” and then plead your case.”
